Inventive spellings of classical names

Creative spellings I've witnessed or heard about this semester:

Opedidus Rex, the famous play by Sophocles

Oddyssey (the student was perhaps commenting on Odysseus' questioning of heroic ideals?)

Oddisseous

The 'profit' Tiresias

For the record, I don't grade on spelling and I have some respect for student's efforts to deal with words and names that are clearly not part of their everyday vocabulary. On the other hand, phonetic spellings like the third above make me wonder how often this particular student has seen the name in print, in his or her textbook. Pin It

Why is the third declension such a black hole for students?

I started my fall Latin course absolutely to help my students succeed in understanding and using the third declension. I even broke a rule that's been repeated to me many times, which is not to distract students by telling them about grammar before you get to it in the book.

"Now, this is the first declension. You take the word's stem (which is self-evidently the same in both the nom. and gen. forms) and attach endings to it."

"By the way -- when you get to the third declension you will need to use the genitive stem, because it's different from the nominative stem.

"Hi, welcome back! Today we're going to talk about the second declension ... By the way ---" etc.

The third declension fell about halfway through the semester. What did they do? Wait for it ...

Over and over again, they took a few (randomly selected) letters off the end of the nominative stem and attached the third declension endings to it.

Readers, I introduced this new (but not unheard-of) concept so carefully. We looked at the endings and the new nouns separately. Then together. We discussed common patterns in third declension nouns. We drilled. We looked for third declension nouns in readings.

After we had reviewed about four times, it seemed clear that my students were going to have as much difficulty with it the seventh time as they did the first time.

I am told that this is a not uncommon reaction to the third declension, and I'm baffled. Would it be better to introduce this declension first? Is there a textbook that does that?

photo credit

Pin It

"Eros is an enemy"

From Chapter 1 of Eros the Bittersweet:

"Desire, then, is neither inhabitant nor ally of the desirer. Foreign to her will, it forces itself irresistibly upon her from without. Eros is an enemy. Its bitterness must be the taste of enmity. That would be hate."

Cool.

image credit Pin It

It worked for Heath Ledger and Queen

Filmmaker to bring the Middle Ages and Rap together in ‘The Quickener’

Pin It

"The Unbearable Truth of War"

This review (of the one-man show An Iliad) won me over immediately by its references to Simone Weil:

While translations abound, dramatizations of the Iliad are fairly uncommon. Of course the poem has inspired countless plays—Aeschylus, for instance, called his tragedies “scraps from Homer’s banquet.” But these typically focus on a single episode, like the Greeks’ efforts to persuade Achilles to return to battle in Book 9. The entirety of Homer’s text runs to over 15,600 lines and would take about 24 hours to recite from beginning to end; it also has hundreds of characters—men, women, gods, demigods, a crying baby, and two immortal, talking horses, among others.

Pin It

Greek myth and the Hunger Games?

I want to/ consider it strategic to do some 'modern myth' before the semester ends in my Greek Myth class. I'd really like to break away from the old "Star Wars! Look, Luke is on a Hero's Journey!" type of thing.

And so, a question for my readers: have you tried to incorporate recent fantasy works or adaptations of Greek myth into your classes? E.g. Harry Potter, the Hunger Games series? How did it go? Pin It

Teaching Koine?

As part of our continuing efforts to improve the Greek program, we are considering making Koine or Biblical Greek a larger part of our offerings at some point in the near future. The thinking is that this offers two advantages:

1) Koine is easier to learn, at least initially. We have a growing problem with students who won't (and perhaps don't know how) to put in the effort required to learn classical Greek.

2) Students interested in ministry have a vested interest in learning Greek well; a few students who are there for a practical purpose can raise the level of the whole class, we hope. (Not that learning Greek for its own sake is wrong or doesn't happen -- goodness no! -- but we get a lot of students who take Greek to 'feel smart' and then find that the challenges of first year have the exact opposite effect.)

Has anyone else started incorporating more Koine into their program? Is it something you would recommend?

(I should note that we are still planning to offer classical texts in second and third year. A student who learns classical Greek and then takes a course in lyric poetry has to become comfortable in a new dialect or dialects -- the same principle would seem to hold for a student who learn Koine and then reads Plato or Herodotus.)

photo credit

Pin It